I often tell my students at the very beginning of the semester that we are going to be readings essays, but that we will be reading them more like poems. I ask them when they consider a poem to be read. If their eyes go over every word in the poem one time, have they read it? They usually say that if it's a poem, it has to be read several times and that some type of meaning has to be found it in. I use this idea of poetic reading to talk about the texts we'll read during the semester. I don't tend to give them a lot of readings, either by page length or by number, but we do tend to read them very, very closely, and when they use them in the essays they write, I expect a level of familiarity with the texts that only comes with multiple readings and conversations, that is, with multiple attempts to create meaning. This has just become something I like to tell them, and there are many times in the semester when a student might be struggling to make connections in an essay, and I might ask how many times he or she has read the text he or she is trying to use. Very often, the difficulty comes from a reversion to the type of reading they are most familiar with: get your eyes over the page, close the book, homework's done.
I am thinking about this in terms of some of the concepts Mayher has been laying out in this second reading. There is the notion of co-construction of meaning between speaker/writer and listener/reader. He complicates the notion that “message sent=message received,” and he—rightly, I think—calls out schooling for relying on the false idea that this is or should be possible or desirable. So much of his distinctions between common and uncommonsense notions of communication remind me of Freire's banking vs. problem-posing educations, respectively. One thing Freire, a huge influence on me personally, warns us against is the notion that teaching involves the transmission of block of information from Teacher to student, that these “deposits” are to remain whole, not to be torn apart, and that the more fully the students accept them whole and then give them back to the teacher, the better the student and the better the teacher. I say Freire warns us because behind this idea lie all types of power and oppression issues: if you can convince students that this deposit is Truth, and that it is to be left unquestioned, then you can really make them believe anything, and you can exploit them endlessly.
The counter-pedagogy is what Freire calls problem-posing, and as the name suggests, it begins with the posing of problems to people, but more specifically, the problems that they encounter in their actual worlds. This clearly reflects relevance theory to some degree, if in name only. The idea is that education, or any form of communication, is only authentic if it is meaningful in the actual lives of the students. There is a whole subtext behind what we teach spoken in the way we teach. (Here is what I am adding sort of.) If our method of teaching denies true communication, then we are subtly teaching them that communication is bad, recalcitrant, punishable. Those deposits are sacred because we said so, and any attempt to subvert their authority is treasonous. For Freire, if you take away people's ability to communicate authentically, you take away their humanity. Clearly, he has much more of a political bend than Mayher, but the concepts seem so deeply interconnected, that I can't help but think of Freire frequently as I read. True communication entails what Mayher might call transaction, as opposed to interaction. If I read him right, he says that the former allows for both parties to be transformed in the communication process, whereas the latter only allows for the receiver to change. Again, for Freire, the notion of transformation is the key concept to education, to life and liberation. Mayher shows us that communication is essentially an organic process, never a static one, that both parties have a vested interest, without which, no real communication takes place.
This is why I started with my classroom. I think now that I am doing a good thing by talking to my students about reading in this way. I now have better language and theory to understand what I'm really saying though. I want them to understand that reading is an interactive process, that the goal is not just to get through it and internalize the author's main points. There is no main point on a certain level. All is interpretations. What is meaningful for them this semester is meaningful because of all types of factors going on their lives. If they read a piece again as seniors, it would have a very different effect, just as Mayher's relationship to Huck Finn changed as he read it over time. These thoughts may seems a bit rambling, but I think they point to the same idea, a main idea in Mayher's piece, which rejects the banking notion of communications and embraces an idea that interpretation is always part of communicating and that to deny this to students is to rob them of what an education is really supposed to do; it sets up a completely artificial learning environment and puts them in a world not reflective of the world we aim to equip them for.
(I will end this posting on a preposition, just for those teachers who told me not to. Fight the power.)
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